I would kind of like to see a rolling contest, one that never really ends. Make it an automated website so there's no manual work involved. You just submit your ruleset, it tallies up the score, then shows it on the scoreboard with a link to download each one. Every X number of hashcat releases, we just take a snapshot of which ruleset is the best.

The biggest reason why I like this approach is that it encourages continuous development.

(04-24-2015, 06:02 PM)coolbry95 Wrote: why not just base the score off of the amount of passwords cracked?

Because it depends on the goal of the contest. If it's to figure out the best rules, then we need a standard set of hashes and a standard wordlist. However, we might just get a ruleset highly specific to the wordlist used. It's likely that a good amount of the rules will still be relevant to any wordlist. If we want a best wordlist + ruleset, then we need to put limits since the best result could be achieved by putting the cracked password list as the wordlist and 1 single rule, the : (don't do modifications)...